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Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent;
there must exist that which transcends it, that Being [the
Absolute], to which all our discussion has been leading.
In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The
Intellectual-Principle is a number [= the expression of a
plurality]; and number derives from unity: the source of a number
such as this must be the authentically One. Further, it is the
sum of an Intellectual-Being with the object of its Intellection,
so that it is a duality; and, given this duality, we must find
what exists before it.
What is this?
The Intellectual-Principle taken separately, perhaps?
No: an Intellect is always inseparable from an intelligible
object; eliminate the intelligible, and the
Intellectual-Principle disappears with it. If, then, what we are
seeking cannot be the Intellectual-Principle but must be
something that rejects the duality there present, then the Prior
demanded by that duality must be something on the further side of
the Intellectual-Principle.
But might it not be the Intelligible object itself?
No: for the Intelligible makes an equally inseparable duality
with the Intellectual-Principle.
If, then, neither the Intellectual-Principle nor the Intelligible
Object can be the First Existent, what is?
Our answer can only be:
The source of both.
What will This be; under what character can we picture It?
It must be either Intellective or without Intellection: if
Intellective it is the Intellectual-Principle; if not, it will be
without even knowledge of itself- so that, either way, what is
there so august about it?
If we define it as The Good and the wholly simplex, we will, no
doubt, be telling the truth, but we will not be giving any
certain and lucid account of it as long as we have in mind no
entity in which to lodge the conception by which we define it.
Yet: our knowledge of everything else comes by way of our
intelligence; our power is that of knowing the intelligible by
means of the intelligence: but this Entity transcends all of the
intellectual nature; by what direct intuition, then, can it be
brought within our grasp?
To this question the answer is that we can know it only in the
degree of human faculty: we indicate it by virtue of what in
ourselves is like it.
For in us, also, there is something of that Being; nay, nothing,
ripe for that participation, can be void of it.
Wherever you be, you have only to range over against this
omnipresent Being that in you which is capable of drawing from
It, and you have your share in it: imagine a voice sounding over
a vast waste of land, and not only over the emptiness alone but
over human beings; wherever you be in that great space you have
but to listen and you take the voice entire- entire though yet
with a difference.
And what do we take when we thus point the Intelligence?
The Intellectual-Principle in us must mount to its origins:
essentially a thing facing two ways, it must deliver itself over
to those powers within it which tend upward; if it seeks the
vision of that Being, it must become something more than
Intellect.
For the Intellectual-Principle is the earliest form of Life: it
is the Activity presiding over the outflowing of the universal
Order- the outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the
continuous process.
In its character as Life, as emanation, as containing all things
in their precise forms and not merely in the agglomerate mass-
for this would be to contain them imperfectly and inarticulately-
it must of necessity derive from some other Being, from one that
does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of
Intellect and of the Universe.
For the Universe is not a Principle and Source: it springs from a
source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging
to the All, since it is to generate the All, and must be not a
plurality but the Source of plurality, since universally a
begetting power is less complex than the begotten. Thus the Being
that has engendered the Intellectual-Principle must be more
simplex than the Intellectual-Principle.
We may be told that this engendering Principle is the
One-and-All.
But, at that, it must be either each separate entity from among
all or it will be all things in the one mass.
Now if it were the massed total of all, it must be of later
origin than any of the things of which it is the sum; if it
precedes the total, it differs from the things that make up the
total and they from it: if it and the total of things constitute
a co-existence, it is not a Source. But what we are probing for
must be a Source; it must exist before all, that all may be
fashioned as sequel to it.
As for the notion that it may be each separate entity of the All,
this would make a self-Identity into a what you like, where you
like, indifferently, and would, besides, abolish all distinction
in things themselves.
Once more we see that this can be no thing among things but must
be prior to all things.
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